#so its not as big as a stigmatization against mental illness but it has plenty of issues

[martyrbat]

okie finished the lets play of arkham city while knitting and. hm..

[butwhatifidothis]

Capn’s fic is the only fic that I’ve read that makes me physically ill. That is a feat because I love horror stories. I’ve watched and read the sickest goriest stuff but it never made me feel bad. It was done to satisfy my curiosity of the bizarre and mysterious darkness presented by the unknown or humanity.

The problem with Capn’s that made it so sickening is its presentation. With horror stories, the evil acts are framed just as that. Evil. There is no sugarcoating even if you are the protagonist. You are wrong and you must be stopped or escaped from. Most of the victims’ perverted, creative, and colorful deaths are not comeuppance but terrible pitiful misfortunes.

Capn’s presentation, and Edelstans’ reception, of the fic sickens me because they make something horrific into a love story. The framing is not of condemnation but adoration. And the adoration is absolute. There is no room allowed for other interpretations or hesitations anywhere in the story. It’s scary. It’s cult-like.

The closest horror I can compare the fic to is, surprisingly, the movie Midsommar. The difference is Midsommar always implies that what is happening is not right and disturbing - the protagonist and the watchers are being indoctrinated into a cult. Capn’s fic never does that and it’s terrifying how many believe him through his sock puppet in the fic - Edelgard.

Lovecraftian stories are pretty close to what he had done but the protagonists there always experience decay in their person. Their flaws are emphasized and never sugarcoated. There is awareness and horror at how far they have fallen with their wretched acts. There’s nothing as such in Capn’s fic.

I’m so sorry for ranting here in a way that barely makes sense. I’m just so upset with what he had done to my fave Dedue. Then there’s the “grand” reveal of his story twist. It’s just too much. Never thought I’d hate an author so much since my tolerance for fuckups is pretty high but here we are.

---

No problem about the ranting, I don’t mind!

I’m also a pretty big fan of horror, which is part of why the presentation of the fic is something I focus on a lot. Unreliable Narrator, the idea of the bad guy getting what they want still being portrayed as an explicitly bad thing, fucked up morals and beliefs being portrayed as fucked up, etc. etc., that’s shit I’ve seen plenty of times, and this fic isn’t it. It justifies the protagonist’s terrible actions and casually throws around a lot of bigoted ideas of men, women, those with mental health issues, relationships, race, etc. without ever acknowledging the bigoted nature of the ideas. 

This fic can have a big scary angry uncontrollable POC man get suddenly and brutally murdered by a white woman because he was going to destroy the body of the tiny pure innocent defenseless dictator warmonger white girl within it without ever taking a step back at the scene and going “Hm, maybe I’m using well-known racial stereotyping that has been used against POC men for at minimum multiple decades, maybe I should rework this scene to not have that.” It's never acknowledged.

This fic can have a young man and an older woman with heavily stigmatize mental health issues be violent, unreasonable ticking time bombs that blow up constantly at slight provocations without ever going back and thinking “Hm, maybe this is a very stereotypical and reductionist depiction of people who go through these mental health issues, maybe I should go over my characterization of them again and make sure I write them more respectfully.” This is accepted as the canon personality to many, many people in the fandom in regards to Rhea, and a non-insignificant amount of people in regards to Dimitri. Also Dimitri doesn’t actually have mental illness apparently

That’s just two things! And this is what people find to be an accurate retelling of 3H, when none of this is in there! If this were truly Unreliable Narrator, then Edelgard and Byleth’s POV wouldn’t be taken as objective fact - they’d be far more critically analyzed to make sure that they do indeed match up with what’s actually happening. That’s not what Edelstans are doing though! Edelgard says it, so it must be true - what’s unreliable about that??  They gobble it up and expect everyone else to do the same and get mad when people go “but that didn’t happen tho” and it’s like... cool, glad this is where the fandom’s at

[jokerepair74-blog]

Some Thoughts On Mental Health & Social Class After Experiencing A Personal Tragedy

This essay deals with death, substance abuse, and mental illness; please only continue to read if you feel it’s healthy for you to do so.

On June 18, I turn 30. By June 30, I will be older than my friend, Emma, ever got to be.

Emma (whose name I’ve changed here for the sake of her loved ones’ privacy) crash-landed into my life when I was in the eighth grade. She was a year older than me, and my Mom had just acquired her as a piano student. “She’s sweet and hilarious — you should get to know her!”

Emma also danced at my studio, and I had just moved into her age group. We became fast friends, and we grew even closer when I joined her in high school. We traveled together, acted in plays together, did every piano duet together and caused all sorts of PG-rated trouble in between. We stayed close throughout and beyond high school (for a fashion, we even dated two guys who were roommates) and our friend group stayed tight into our twenties. Personal issues drove her away from the group in the latter half of that decade, but we always maintained our affection and a bit of contact.

Emma was everything you’d say about a friend who died too young — full of life, bright, kinder to everyone than she was to herself, creative but unmotivated, funnier than any of us thought was humanly possible. She went through a million phases — granola bohemian yoga chick one day, marathoner with emerging calf muscles the next.

One Sunday in November, I was making cashew cheese sauce when I got a call from my ex out of the blue. Emma had died the night before. I still remember the frenzy of my husband emerging from the bedroom, wondering if he should hold me as I sobbed or stir the cheese sauce to keep it from burning (somehow, he did both). I remember my dining room crumbling around me as I repeated over and over, “I thought she was getting better.”

There were a lot of tragic aspects of Emma’s death: the fact that it happened at all, the fact that it happened less than two weeks after her 30th birthday, the fact that I’d barely spoken to her in two years out of what I will admit was fear of too much drama. (I was re-traumatized two weeks later when I finally had the courage to search my messages from her and saw that my last message from her was to say that she missed me like crazy and we should try to get together.) But I also struggled with the stigma around her death. Telling people I’d lost a friend recently was sympathetic. But could I risk the admission given the inevitable question of how she died? “Was she sick?” “Well, sort of.”

Emma had died of a drug overdose after years of struggle and occasional triumph. She lived with mental illness, for which she had sought help numerous times, and she had been putting in the work. I don’t believe she died because she wasn’t strong enough. It’s just that with addiction and mental illness, the tools most people are even able to access are the equivalent of bringing a spork to a knife fight – I know from my own experience with mental health and access to care.

After the funeral, where my friends and I grieved as one, I allowed the shock and trauma to take its course, and I knew that soon I’d be able to parse this out healthily. Then, weeks later, my incredible and resilient Grandpa died, resulting in a drawn-out, overlapping and utterly chaotic grieving process.

It’s only now, six months later, that I am able to look outside the individually tragic nature of Emma’s death. As summer entrenches my city, as our sitting provincial government wages a war against safe injection sites, and as mental healthcare continues to bounce like the half-deflated political football it is, I’ve asked myself — how does the world foster and enable lives like Emma’s? What are the barriers that separated Emma’s life from a life like mine — and what were the factors preventing me from becoming someone like Emma?

I, too, live with mental illness, although it’s less severe. My issues with anxiety have been manageable enough that I’ve been allowed to indulge my inner coward and only take an “on and off” approach to therapy and counseling and waffle on the idea of medication.

Like many young working professionals, I have access to mental health counseling on paper, but it’s still harder to work out in the practical sense. My plan covers a finite number of approved practitioners in my area for a finite number of hours. I have the financial privileges of being married to someone with benefits, but that’s also finite — combined, I still can’t necessarily attend therapy on what most people would call a “regular” basis without paying out of pocket. And there’s no such thing as paying “a little bit” for therapy, since pretty much any session goes into the hundreds of dollars.

And, like many working in a post-recession era, I work on an under-staffed team (when I came back from my Grandpa’s funeral, I found myself one writer down and doing the job of two for four months). No one would have ever told me outright that I couldn’t take part of an afternoon off to see a therapist, but I knew that it would throw a real wrench in our gears.

“You need help, there’s no shame in that” is what’s said out loud, but “it’s going to make things difficult” is the subtext. And that’s a microcosm for most mental health messaging these days. “Erase the stigma.” “Take care of your mental health the way you take care of your dental health.” But when it comes to the people with the power to help that happen — those in the C-suite, community leaders and politicians — they shrug. “Tools? What tools?”

At times, the lack of flexibility to address my mental health issues without derailing my work and personal life weighs on me, and I’m someone who has a job, benefits, a spouse, and issues that can go untreated with no major impact on my life. (Emma, too, had the financial support and resources to even have access treatment such as in-patient programs, which many aren’t lucky enough to do.)

But imagine if I worked in fast food, if I were still a student, if I had no job. Imagine if I had to choose between checking into an inpatient program and keeping my job. Even if I were simply at my last job, where I made a decent salary, my benefits came in the form of a “health spending account” — i.e. a finite amount of money. Imagine the tragedy of getting a diagnosis and prescription only to find out you can’t afford that prescription. Now imagine the added insult when brands appropriate the concept of “self-care,” when friends well-meaningly recommend bath bombs and yoga for stress management. (And I do believe that kind of self-care has its place, but it’s situations like this that separate run-of-the-mill, everyday mental health treatment from actual mental illness treatments. Meditation and gratitude journals are flossing, but therapy is a root canal — and no one can floss away the need for a root canal.)

In Canada, one of our biggest campaigns for mental health assistance is Bell Let’s Talk in January. This past year, Bell, a vertically integrated telecommunications and media company, raised $9 million CAD ($6.7 million USD)  in community funds grants — $3.53 million CAD ($2.6 million USD) for children and youth grants, $1.5 million CAD ($1.1 million USD) for Indigenous communities. The campaign has made some improvements in terms of intersectionality; years ago, it focused mainly on mood disorders and featured largely white, affluent spokespeople. It still taps the same well-known celebrities for the big blitzes, like comedian Howie Mandel and cyclist Clara Hughes, but recently, it has shared more stories from everyday people with more stigmatized mental illnesses, like personality disorders and addiction. It’s also positioned the stories of more diverse people (in terms of race, occupation, economic background and more) on the same pages as celebrities like Mandel and Hughes, signaling that their stories are equally important. In recent years, it has also added support for Indigenous communities, where many have identified an epidemic in youth suicides. There’s still plenty of criticism for the campaign and what many call a simplification of mental health, but it’s at least been heartening to see changes made, even if they’re gradual.

However, in the end, that $9 million has been a drop in the bucket, because organizations like CAMH (Centre for Addiction and Mental Health) still require outside donations and funding. Part-time and low-income workers still don’t have the same access to mental health services as people like me. According to CAMH, Canadians in the lowest income bracket are three to four times more likely to report poor to fair mental health than those in the highest income bracket. Mental illness occurs within the homeless population at a rate of 23 to 67%. All the while, too many still treat addiction as separate from mental illness; the same Ontario MPPs (Member of Provincial Parliament) who Tweeted that they wanted to “overcome the stigma” around mental illness also voted to restrict safe injection sites in key urban areas.

As a journalist who specifically reports on the marketing industry, I’ve always been cynical about corporate mental health awareness. But I no longer see this as just an “issue.” It’s a full-on crisis.

Drug use is still treated as a criminal issue more than a health problem. And, according to CAMH, at least 20% of people with a mental illness have a co-occurring substance abuse problem, and people with substance abuse problems are three times more likely to have a mental illness. In Canada, people of color are overrepresented in our criminal justice system, but are underrepresented in diversionary programs, such as Ontario’s mental health court (which is offered to people who commit certain infractions while suffering mental health episodes).

In our day-to-day life, we also don’t often realize the way we enable and brush off addictive behaviours, especially in women. The National Institute on Drug Abuse finds that women are just as likely to develop substance abuse problems with illicit drugs and alcohol. Women also may be more susceptible to cocaine and methamphetamine use. From a pop culture standpoint, everything from “Mommy Needs Wine” culture to collegiate binge-drinking seems to be brushed off as normal, or even passed off as an empowering form of female rebellion against the expectation that we stay demure and sweet. While it’s not fair to put something as complex as addiction and recovery on the backs of individuals, those of us who do have healthy relationships with alcohol and drugs need to still be keenly aware of the ways our society pushes us toward partying and substance abuse — even the legal kind. The fact that your workplace can’t seem to have a company get-together without issuing everyone three drink tickets may not be a trigger for you, but you might want to be aware of the behaviors of your peers.

And so here I am, staring 30 in the face and determined not to become a statistic, and trying to figure out how to retroactively make the world better for my friend who did become one. Those who have tried to make me feel better by saying her death couldn’t have been prevented have only been half-correct — I refuse to accept that death from addiction and mental illness is an inevitability, even if it’s damn hard for me, as an individual, to make sure that deaths like Emma’s become easier to prevent.

But I need help to do that, and I need help from people and bodies more powerful than me. I need the corporations who challenge me to take care of my mental health the way I take care of my dental health to fund their employees’ therapy to the same proportion that they fund dental visits. I need political parties who give themselves five-month breaks from the legislature to reinstate policies that would allow part-time workers the same access to paid time off as their full-time, salaried equivalents. I need municipal governments who evict and destroy tent cities to tell me where those people are going to go, especially if they’ve just voted against more affordable housing and more sheltered spaces. I need local media to stop running puffy real estate pieces glorying gentrification while treating the displaced people with mental illnesses as props for comic tragedy.

I need the people reading this to look at the people at the “bottom” of society and check their empathy. I need us to be open to having those hard conversations with friends who get trashed at every company party, no matter how much “emotional labor” it requires from us. I need us to not support pop-up shops and restaurants that come at the expense of homeless people’s sleeping spaces.

And I need us to keep talking about it, not in the generic, puffy ad campaign that says “talk about it.” I need those of us who have the privilege to keep bringing our feedback up the chain at work. I need those of us who have access to their MPs, MPPs and local government representatives to talk to them about what our reality is. I need those of us who discover new food banks, free drop-in programs, and support groups to offer our time and resources to promote them.

Because we need help, and I refuse to believe that we are going to do it alone.

Bree Rody-Mantha is a full-time business journalist and part-time dance teacher based in Toronto. She covered Toronto City Hall during the Rob Ford era before transitioning to business journalism. Her areas of specialty include the influencer market, advertising, media buying, and technology. Follow her on Twitter.

Image via Unsplash

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Source: https://thefinancialdiet.com/some-thoughts-on-mental-health-social-class-after-experiencing-a-personal-tragedy/

[thebreakfastgenie]

Ok, I finished Tiger King. Time for some thoughts. A brief note, I will be referring to Joe Exotic’s “zoo” as a facility, rather than a zoo, because I refuse to participate in any possible confusion between roadside “zoos” and legitimate zoos. 

I do think Joe Exotic started out caring about animals, but deeply misguided, but he was not caring for his animals. He abused them. Watch how quickly he gets angry when the tiger starts grabbing his shoes. He also became much more motivated by “I can do what I want and no one can tell me no” than by actual love for his animals. He definitely dabbled in some nasty right-wing ideologies. 

He was also pretty clearly abusing Travis and probably John and Dillon. 

Rick seems like an underrated contender for worst person in this documentary until the last five minutes or so when he gains self-awareness and acknowledges his role. 

Jeff Lowe’s role in Joe’s arrest is sketchy as hell but Joe wasn’t framed and deserved to go down. Jeff Lowe should also go down. Jeff Lowe is absolutely a con artist, but he didn’t con Joe out of his facility. Joe frequently put things in other people’s names to dodge legal issues. He willingly signed the zoo over to Jeff to keep it out of his legal issues and expected Jeff to still let him have complete control. 

Joe Exotic’s behavior toward Carole Baskin is really deplorable. The harassment, threats, and violence (the music video, everything with the blow-up doll...). 

I’ve seen some hot takes saying this documentary exploits mental illness and that is absolute nonsense. There is no mental illness that excuses Joe Exotic’s behavior toward Carole or many of the other people who appear and to suggest that further stigmatizes people who are mentally ill and do not behave that way.

I think Doc Antle might be the worst person featured. Fuck that guy. 

I’m 100% certain Joe Exotic blew up his own studio. He was angry with Rick and aware that the only copy of Rick’s footage was in there, plus there was the possibility of that footage being damaging, plus there were things in there he was expected to produce for the lawsuit. Add that it allowed him to play the victim and suggest Carole was the culprit and his absolute obsession with explosives... yeah. 

That one article is nonsense because Saff is not the only non-horrible person featured in the series. There are plenty of others, like Carole and Barbara, the former member of Doc’s cult. Saff is also not innocent. He’s not awful but I don’t condone any of the employees continuing to be involved in Joe’s operation and not reporting the many crimes that were going on. 

Let’s talk about Carole....

Carole Baskin did nothing wrong. One of my big criticisms is the documentary not challenging the Joe Exotic narrative that this was a simple, mutual rivalry. The scene that shows Carole and Howard’s filing cabinets on Joe Exotic, in my opinion, frames it like she was unduly obsessed with him. She had all those files because she was suing him and he filed various counterclaims which generates a ton of paperwork. He was also threatening her. HIS obsession was the reason for all of that. 

I do have some questions about Carole’s sanctuary. I think it’s probably legit, but I would do some research before visiting. I’m concerned about her comment that her sanctuary is just a comfortable place for the tigers to live until they die, but I do think it’s innocent and simply referring to the harm that was done to them by not allowing them to be wild. My main concerns are with how much she has the public inside. Obviously zoos do this, but many sanctuaries have extremely limited visiting, if they’re open to the public at all, which is often because it’s stressful for the abused rescue animals. That being said, it’s possible Carole’s animals are fine with it and it is a good source of funds. 

My biggest issue is that she seems to rely primarily if not entirely on volunteer labor and her volunteers were working some crazy hours. If she has the money to be in court for years she has the money to pay a few employees, which she should do even if people are willing to do it for free. Having volunteers is excellent but I think she relies on them too much. 

Carole absolutely, for certain, did not kill Don Lewis. Don Lewis was involved in organized crime. He was smuggling animals and almost certainly other things as well, drugs and who knows what else. Don got himself whacked by his business partners or customers or suppliers in organized crime. His kids and ex-wife are just mad that they didn’t get his crime money. If there was any evidence against the much-younger wife the cops would have been all over that. She may have altered the power-of-attorney documents, but I’m not convinced of that either. The only evidence we really have is the secretary’s word and I see no reason to trust her. Why would she be power-of-attorney for Carole? Why wouldn’t Don’s wife be power-of-attorney? The “or disappearance” language is weird until you remember Don made a lot of weird comments alluding to the possibility and the “if I pull this off...” I find it perfectly believable he may have included that because he knew his lifestyle might lead to that outcome. 

I do have one criticism of the documentary itself. I understand that it is primarily about this story, not the debate of captive animals, but by focusing on who it focuses on it inevitably gets into that topic. I wish there had been some mention of legitimate zoos. The discussion of “tigers in captivity” does not break down whether any of those are living in AZA accredited zoos like Toledo, Bronx, Brookfield, San Diego, etc. Animal rights activists are often opposed to all zoos. Everyone, including the general public, is often confused about the different between facilities like Joe Exotic’s and legitimate zoos. Zoo is not a regulated term in any way, so anything can call itself a zoo. 

Legitimate zoos do not allow cub petting or any contact with most animals outside veterinary care. Tigers in legitimate zoos live in enclosures as nice as or nicer than Carole’s sanctuary. They are encouraged to continue natural behaviors. Their cubs are not interfered with unless the mother is unwilling or unable to care for them (this did not used to be standard practice but it is now, hand-rearing deprives an animal of much of its natural development). I would have loved to see a little more representation to tiger breeding through legitimate means for the purpose conversation, like the Species Survival Plan. Zoos have not yet been able to release animals like big cats into the wild, but have participate in repopulation efforts by releasing insects and some reptiles like the Kihansi Spray Toad. People like Doc Antle appropriate the language of conservation while actively harming endangered species. 

This topic could honestly be its own post so I’m going to wrap up, but feel free to discuss any of this. #CaroleDidNothingWrong